With the advent of permission-based marketing, loyalty programs, and other marketing approaches that use the customer's identification card to trigger the promotions to the customer, it has been demonstrated that the more information collected about the customer, the more successful the promotion. Additionally, if frequent customers are rewarded by these systems, the loyalty of the customer is improved, resulting in increased business for the merchant. Since one of the most significant expenses related to setting up of a loyalty program is the issuance of IDs to the customers, the cost of the setup will not proportionate to the size of the merchant. This discourages small merchants from using loyalty programs as marketing tools.
A second problem is that existing loyalty programs have found that the customers dislike systems where two cards must be “swiped” in order to complete a transaction. Thus, loyalty programs based on both an ID card and a separate payment card have proven to be less successful than ones based on a combined payment card/loyalty card, like those issued by some petroleum companies.
The use of various bankcards has come into common use for payment of transactions. These bankcards are scanned at the point of sale. They contain a unique identifier for the user. These identifiers are variously called “Account Code”, “account number” or another name. The term “Account Code” will be used herein to mean any of these, as there is no need that the Account Code be strictly numeric. Unfortunately, some of the fields have restricted use, namely the unique identifier Account Code. Other items encoded on the card are not restricted, but are not unique.
The present invention uniquely uses the non-restricted information to develop a customer ID that has a low probability of having duplicates, such that the customer ID can be used in a loyalty program, thereby reducing the cost of the deployment of a loyalty program.